Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (36 page)

Events continued to confirm my analysis. In March the Labour Government’s Defence White Paper announced sharp cuts in the defence
budget, £4,700 million over the next ten years. In the same month Alexander Shelepin, previously head of the KGB and now in charge of the Soviet Union’s ‘trade unions’, arrived in Britain as a guest of the TUC. The following month saw the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese communists amid scenes of chaos, adding to America’s woes. Cuban ‘advisers’ were beginning to arrive to support the communist MPLA faction in Angola. It was, however, what I heard and read about the preparations for the Helsinki summit that triggered my decision to speak.

The idea for Helsinki had come from the Soviets, was warmly welcomed by Chancellor Brandt’s West Germany as a contribution to
Ostpolitik
, and was then accepted on to the Nixon Administration’s agenda. The West wanted the Soviets to enter into talks to reduce their military superiority in Europe – Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) – and to respect the human rights of their subject peoples. But what did the Soviets want? This was by far the most interesting question, since even if, as the sceptics suggested, they would not honour their agreements anyway, they still would not have taken this trouble unless something important for them would result. Respectability could be the only answer. If the Soviet Union and its satellites – particularly the more potentially fragile regimes in eastern Europe – could receive the international seal of approval they would feel more secure.

But did we want them to feel more secure? Arguably, one of the most exploitable weaknesses of totalitarian dictatorships is the paranoid insecurity which flows from the lack of consent to the regime itself and which results in inefficiency and even paralysis of decision-taking. If the Soviets felt more secure, if their new-found respectability gave them greater access to credit and technology, if they were treated with tolerant respect rather than suspicious hostility, how would they use these advantages?

If I was to challenge the accepted wisdom on these matters I needed expert help. But most of the experts had jumped aboard the Sovietology gravy train which ran on official patronage, conferences with ‘approved’ Soviet academics, visa journalism and a large dose of professional complacency. I had, however, through John O’Sullivan of the
Daily Telegraph
, heard about Robert Conquest, a British historian and fearless critic of the USSR. I asked him to help me and together we wrote the speech which I delivered on Saturday 26 July 1975 in Chelsea. The occasion itself was only arranged a few days in advance. I did not speak to Reggie Maudling or anyone else in the Shadow Cabinet about it beforehand, because I knew that all I would receive were obstruction and warnings,
which would doubtless be leaked afterwards – particularly if things went wrong.

I began by setting the large military imbalance between the West and the Soviet Union against the background of the retreat of western power. I drew particular attention to the Soviet naval build-up, describing the Soviet navy as a global force with more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together and more surface ships than could possibly be needed to protect the USSR’s coast and merchant shipping. I argued that nothing was more important to our security than the American commitment to Europe, adding that an isolationist Britain would encourage an isolationist America.

I then dealt with the imminent Helsinki summit. I did not attack détente directly, indeed I called for a ‘real’ détente. But I quoted Leonid Brezhnev speaking in June 1972 to illustrate the Soviets’ true intentions. Brezhnev had affirmed that peaceful coexistence ‘in no way implies the possibility of relaxing the ideological struggle. On the contrary we must be prepared for this struggle to be intensified and become an even sharper form of confrontation between the systems.’

I also drew attention to the importance of human rights as a further measure of the nature of the regime with which we were dealing:

Human rights would, we already knew, be the subject of far-reaching verbal undertakings in the so-called ‘Basket Three’ of the Helsinki package – ‘Co-operation in humanitarian and other fields’. But I placed no trust in the Soviets’ good faith: indeed, since their whole system depended upon repression, it was difficult to see how they could comply. I suspected that for many of those present at Helsinki – and not just on the communist side – the undertakings about human rights would be regarded as uplifting rhetoric rather than clear conditions to be rigorously monitored. So I noted:

The reaction to this speech confirmed that I was the odd woman out. The Helsinki Agreement was widely welcomed. I could imagine the shaking of wise heads at my impulsive imprudence. Reggie Maudling came round at once to see me in Flood Street to express both his anger at my delivering such a speech without consulting him and his disagreement with its content. I gave no ground. Indeed, Mr Brezhnev’s evident satisfaction at what Helsinki achieved helped convince me that I must return to the subject: he described it as ‘a necessary summing up of the political outcome of the Second World War’. In other words he regarded it – not least perhaps the commitment not to alter European borders except ‘by peaceful means and by agreement’ – as recognizing and legitimizing the Soviet hold on eastern Europe which they had obtained by force and fraud at the end of the war.

The Helsinki summit of 1975 is now viewed in a favourable light because the dissidents in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe used its provisions as a programme for which to fight in their long struggle with the communist State. And indeed by making human rights a matter of treaty obligations rather than domestic law it gave the dissidents leverage which they employed to the full. Their bravery would have been of little account, however, without the subsequent western, particularly American, renewal of resolve and defence build-up. These halted the expansion that had given Soviet communism the psychological prestige of historical inevitability, exerted an external pressure on communist regimes that diverted them from domestic repression, and gave heart to the burgeoning resistance movements against communism. This pincer movement – the revived West and the dissidents – more than countered the advantages that the Soviets received from Helsinki in the form of increased legitimacy
and western recognition. Without that, Helsinki would have been just one more step on the road to defeat.

Undoubtedly, the most important foreign tour I made in 1975 – probably the most significant during my time as Leader of the Opposition – was to the United States in September. I already, of course, knew something of the States; and I liked and admired most of what I knew. This, however, was my first opportunity to meet all the leading political figures, and do so on something approaching equal terms. I was guaranteed plenty of media attention, if largely for the depressing reason that Britain’s stock had rarely fallen lower. American newspapers, magazines and television programmes were concentrating on the precipitous decline of the British economy, the advance of trade union power, the extension of the socialist state and what was perceived to be a collapse of national self-confidence. Aside from the
schadenfreude
, also evident was a nagging worry that America, itself suffering a deep but different crisis in the wake of the fall of Vietnam and the trauma of Watergate, might suffer the same fate.
*

Gordon Reece flew on ahead of me to New York in order to set up the media arrangements. Just before I left London he telephoned to say that expectations of my visit were now so high that I should make the first speech I was to deliver – to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York – a blockbuster rather than, as planned, a low-key performance with the main speech coming later in Washington. I began by taking head-on the American comments on the sorry state of contemporary Britain and treating them seriously. I then drew attention to what I called ‘the progressive consensus, the doctrine that the state should be active on many fronts in promoting equality: in the provision of social welfare and in the redistribution of wealth and incomes’. There followed a detailed analysis of its effects in the form of over-taxation, the discouragement of enterprise, the squeeze on profits, the defrauding of savers by inflation
and negative interest rates and the apparently inexorable growth of the public sector and public spending.

I was promptly attacked back home by the Labour Government for running Britain down abroad. In fact, the message I was bringing to America about Britain was essentially one of hope, namely that the nation’s potential was great enough to withstand even the effects of socialism. The criticism from the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who quaintly criticized me later for putting ‘argumentative passages’ into my American speeches, found a faithful echo in the British Embassy where I was staying. A senior member of the embassy staff briefed the American press against me. Gordon Reece quickly discovered what was happening, and there was a sharp exchange of letters on the subject between me and Jim Callaghan when I returned to England.

Aware of the attempt to try to cast me in this light, I used my speech to the National Press Club in Washington to point out that if the present socialist policies were abandoned, Britain had underlying strengths which would ensure its swift recovery. A shift of popular opinion against the far Left, the extent of our energy reserves and the strength of our scientific potential – shown by seventy-two Nobel Prizes, more than France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium put together – all justified long-term optimism.

In the course of my American visit I met the key figures in the Ford Administration. Dr Kissinger I knew already. But this was the first time that I had met Bill Simon, the free-market-minded Treasury Secretary, who had jettisoned the wage and price controls imposed under President Nixon, and the immensely experienced James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, the Administration’s principal internal opponent to détente.

I was also received by President Ford himself. He was a large, friendly man, unexpectedly precipitated into high office who, perhaps to his own surprise as well as that of others, had started to relish it. He had assembled or inherited a talented team around him and had already demonstrated to the Europeans America’s continued commitment to their security, in spite of all the upheavals of domestic politics. He had, in fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of what in current political parlance is described as ‘a safe pair of hands’. He was not the kind of man to challenge accepted orthodoxies, which I increasingly believed ought to be challenged. But he was a reassuring and steady figure who helped America heal the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate. After a rocky period in the wake of his pardon for Richard Nixon, his Administration’s fortunes appeared to be improving, and his undeclared bid for the Republican nomination was proceeding against a genially effective campaign by a certain Governor Ronald Reagan. President Ford’s prospects for re-election appeared good. I came away hoping that he would succeed.

I found on my return to London that the coverage given to my American tour had transformed my political standing. Even the Labour Party’s simulated outrage helped. For the more attention was paid to my arguments, the more seriously they were taken. I was soon conscious also of a change of attitude within the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. People who had regarded my accession to the leadership as an irritating but temporary fluke had to think again. Not only was I evidently being treated seriously by some of the most powerful figures in the free world; the warnings I had given in my Helsinki speech looked ever less eccentric and more prescient.

In late September the Cubans, acting as Soviet surrogates, began to pour troops into Angola. In December the US Senate overturned President Ford’s policy of providing assistance to the anti-communist forces there and resistance to the MPLA collapsed. I thought and read more about these things over Christmas and decided that I would make a further speech.

On this occasion I stuck to the conventions and told Reggie Maudling of my decision. It was perhaps a testimony to his unease at the prospect that Reggie went so far as to offer me a draft. Unfortunately, as Denis might have said, ‘It was so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.’ Bob Conquest had now departed for the Hoover Institution in California, so I asked Robert Moss to help me. The editor of the
Economist
’s Foreign Report, an expert on security and strategic matters, one of
the founders of the National Association for Freedom set up to combat overweening trade union power, and destined to be a best-selling novelist, Robert turned out to be an ideal choice.